The present invention relates to a device for automatically recognizing a commercial message (referred to as "CM" hereinafter) broadcast as requested.
CM are widely utilized in TV broadcasting as an advertising medium. Enterprises act as sponsors for TV programs and spend large amounts of money to prepare and broadcast CMs.
It has been known, however, that TV broadcasting companies must rely upon a large number of employees and use very complicated devices to realize a broadcasting. For these reasons, TV programs are not always broadcast as scheduled and CMs are not always actually broadcast at a time and with the content requested by a sponsor, which is a very serious problem for the sponsor.
In order to solve this problem, there is a business field in which it is checked whether or not a required broadcasting is actually performed.
In this business field, the checking of necessary items is usually done human eyes and ears. That is, watchers view a plurality of TV monitors located within a service area of TV broadcasting, each monitor being set for a different channel, while recording broadcasting programs by a corresponding number of video tape recorders to fix the contents of the broadcast programs, which are collected subsequently to find any error.
This has drawbacks in that the number of watchers required is considerable and in that, since such watchers are human beings, human error may degrade the reliability of the monitoring in many ways.